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Negroes with Guns

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Negroes with Guns

A mans testimony about the unfair justice of American society during the 1960’s is depicted in grave detail in this Narrative Negroes with Guns. The narrator, Robert Williams expresses his experiences with the legal system that he once had faith in, but now has betrayed him. Now with this mind set of taking the law into his own hands, Williams is on a quest to change the course of the racial inequalities of the time. With court cases, passive-aggressive protest and having an “enough is enough” attitude towards the white mans unjust ways of law, Williams stands his ground.

Williams was a veteran who wasn’t forceful in his approach to obtain civil rights. He speaks of a time where he was confronted by a white man with a bat and an angry mob screaming “Kill the Niggers”. Neither the white man, the mob nor the police expected him to be armed. This was the start of Williams’ revolution in Monroe North Carolina. Williams wasn’t going to sit around and be pushed around. He was going to use his constitutional right to bear arms and defend himself. This way of thinking would cause Williams his seat as president of the Monroe Chapter of the NAACP.

Violence wasn’t the way of the game. It was “self-defense”. Why should it be ok for whites to lie on blacks and lynch, rape or do whatever they saw fit to do to them at the time, and blacks not have the right to defend themselves?

“I struck him in the face and knocked him back away from the car and put my carbine in his face, and I told him we were not going to surrender to a mob. I told him that we didn’t intend to be lynched. The other policeman who had run around the side of the car started to draw his revolver out of the holster. He was hoping to shoot me in the back. They didn’t know that we had more than one gun.”(pg10)

Williams is now seeing that this is the way it has to

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